Two working arms and legs

I’m sucking at the blogging again. But I had family in town and then I went out of town and then I had Linda in town. Seriously, the last three weekends have been very busy and! at work I’ve been trying to do my research and I picked up 10 hours of TA work.

So I have all kinds of rambles in my head. I was going to say lately, but really? That would have been a big fat lie considering I ramble all the time in my head about all kinds of things. Lately it’s about what makes us happy. Not like that TED talk where the dude was talking about synthesizing happiness. Although maybe. I meant, like, in the moments where you aren’t working towards your big goals in life, where you aren’t worrying about money or family, what makes it possible for us to be happy? Definitely part of it is the way we process our lives. If your mind constantly sticks on the amount of calories in the food you ate or the money you spent or that thing so and so said to you, it’s going to be very hard to be happy. If you treat others badly, that takes its toll on you too. There’s a million tiny things that can clearly be signs of people just not being happy or content with their lives.

I’ve met happy people who aren’t depressed, but are in a bad relationship or are struggling with family or money problems. They are still happy people, despite whatever struggles they’ve invited into their lives or they’ve taken upon themselves.

I’ve met unhappy people who aren’t depressed, but have the best luck and refuse to see it. They manage to be accomplished at work and have good days just like the happy people, but you’d never know it from how they talk.

I’ve met happy and unhappy depressed people. It took me a while to realize that depression doesn’t account for everything. Because it doesn’t. Because if it did, then how on earth could you have two people who clearly have clinical depression problems, but one manages to still see how wow, today was a good day, I’m just having trouble feeling that goodness and people who had the same types of things happen to them, but only feel the fact that they missed their bus.

So lately I’ve been trying to see, what do the happy people, depressed or not, have in common. What do the unhappy people have in common. I think it’s about respect and love. If you love yourself and life and you have respect for your life and other’s lives, this leads to happiness. It makes it easier to be happy.

Lately (this time it is true) I’ve become increasingly aware just how important respect is. Respect for yourself, for the people around you, for the things we have and the things we kill in order to make space for ourselves. Love for yourself and people in general and especially your loved ones.

I think most of us forget to love and respect ourselves. I don’t mean the stupid modern don’t let your kids become your life and take time for yourself and be selfish shit that people tend to abuse lately. I mean, loving the way you process the world around you. Appreciating how it’s different from other people. Deciding that your hair, despite all the ways you hate it, is interesting to you. I don’t know, there’s a million ways, none of them overt or time consuming, to love yourself.

If you aren’t happy that your skin is warm just behind your knees and the fact that your ankles hurt when you sleep on your stomach, how can you find amazement in how your husband’s back is warmer than behind his knees and that one of his feet is more crooked than the other? If you don’t appreciate that you get sad at old movies because black and white makes things too stark and be amazed at that quirk of your personality, how can you find the fact that your husband pretends to like horror movies but never watches them adorable or that your mom cries at movie weddings but not real ones hilarious? It’s not just that we should know these things about ourselves, but that we should like them. We should realize that we will never be anyone else in this world and that makes our quirks some of the most precious things in our lives. Underneath every interaction and ever touch you give, beats the fact that you love. That you know how valuable your touch is to you and thus to the people you touch. That everything you give, even to those who don’t appreciate it, comes from love and respect.

I wanted to end this post there, but I think I have a more concise way of saying what I’m trying to say. We only have one point of view in life. If we can’t like that point of view, how can we ever like what we see with it?